Tag Archives: litcom

Below is the programme for the literature and communities conference. This is the latest event in the programme we organise from UEA for and with Connected Communities. Further information is here.

Venue: Writers’ Centre Norwich, Dragon Hall, King Street, Norwich

Thursday 2 March

12:15-13:00Registration

13:00-13:15 Welcome and introduction

13:15-14:00 1. Keynote address

Celebrating Reading in Athens

Ava Chalkiadaki, UNESCO World Book Capital, Athens

Chair: George McKay, UEA

14:00-15:30 2. Community and Place A

Writing ‘home’: madness, health and gender in the work of the female authors of the Greater Moray Firth Issie MacPhail, University of the Highlands and Islands Rural Health and Wellbeing and Jane Verburg, Cromarty History Society

The John Hewitt Society: ‘Once alien here’ Jan Carson, writer and community arts facilitator, and Hilary Copeland, General Manager, The John Hewitt Society

Creative writing and / as community arts practice Lynne Bryan and Belona Greenwood, Words and Women

Community relations and affect in post-industrial townscapes: ‘Merthyr gave me a hug’ Peter Davies, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Literary pathways in the co-creation and re-presentation of stories by, with and from disadvantaged young people Candice Satchwell, University of Central Lancashire

A Tale of Two Cities Polly Moseley, Liverpool John Moores University

The Gloves of Democracy: Co-Constructing Stories with Children and Young People Hugh Escott, Sheffield Hallam University, and Sarah Christie, Grimm and Co.

Chair: Dave Ward, The Windows Project

Parallel Sessions

Spaces limited – booking will be available at registration

Day 1 16:00 – 17:30

Writing home

Jane Moss, Independent Researcher

This practical writing workshop offers an approach to writing about our personal ideas of home and community; the places and communities we consider our homelands, whether we live in them now, are in exile, or have moved on from them. The session is facilitated by Jane Moss, a writer working in communities in Cornwall. Jane will use the Dear Homeland model established by Steve Potter (www.dearhomeland.com) to demonstrate the way writing letters to and from our homelands can give rise to reflection and realisations about our concepts of home and our relationship with the communities in which we live. Jane, with colleagues in Lapidus Cornwall (www.lapidus.org.uk), has hosted this workshop at the Penzance Literary Festival and other community settings, and is interested in the potential for creative writing to bring people together to enhance community cohesion and a shared sense of story making across diverse communities of interest and place within localities. You will need to bring a pen and paper, and are warmly invited to participate and reflect on the process of writing as an individual practice and as a group experience, and of the role of the writer-facilitator in the community.

The middle classes form a buffer between the super-rich and the detached poor. They join in with the finger pointing by proxy through being uninformed about the reality of what’s right in front of us.

Life Chances is a project within the Productive Margins programme. Participants, community organisations, the researchers and artists have together produced a published fictional novel, an interactive game, and jewellery.

The novel combines participant’s characterisations into a collaborative storyline that is both critical of policies and services and provides radical inclusive alternatives from community perspectives. The focus is on welfare provisions and reform and foregrounding how families experience these in their daily lives. Utopian thinking and re-imagining is introduced in order to offer alternative systems of regulation such as benefits, housing, immigration and child protection. Whilst ostensibly a work of fiction, Life Chances is also a rich data source allowing different understandings of people’s lives to be co-constructed in ways that provide people control over the story telling and making. How much of the novel is art and how much social science data collection and how the two disciplines have been utilised, and for what purposes, will be the focus of our presentation.